Twenty Eleven Showcase Template – WP 3+ Theme?

Twenty Eleven Showcase Template

I have still remember I promised to create a video about how to use Showcase sidebar wordpress 3.2 using Twenty Eleven showcase template.

I honestly received many emails everyday from this blog and the email senders basically asked many questions which are related to wordpress.

I truly appreciated those emails and really happy reading them (yes, I read them all!), but unfortunately I do not have time to reply them one by one, especially solving all of the problems.

For people who look for solution of wp issues, I can only recommend, official wordpress forum, or if this does not help, I also recommend wordpress freelancer site, where you can look for a freelancer to help you.

I love blogging, however, I am a normal housewife with two kids and daily life is making me extremely busy at the moment, especially now my only one beloved daughter goes to Kindergarten everyday, and I have to bring her there every morning, and pick her up again before 12 noon- that’s my daily busy life.

If you are a subscriber in this blog, you will also notice that I cannot frequently post everyday now in my blog, as I used to, because of busy too.

In the past, I post one post, and outsourcing one post so everyday, posting two posts in this site, however it doesn’t work lately, so I hope in the future, I can be more concentrating in this blog better.

Enough with my ranting lol, now we are back to this tutorial, basically, without activating or using Twenty Eleven showcase template, unfortunately, you will not able to use Showcase sidebar widget.

Twenty Eleven Showcase Template Method

The method is almost very similar to creating a wordpress page with no sidebar, using the built-in template which is already included in this default WP theme.

There are actually some custom template you can create or make in a theme. For example, apart of creating a page without sidebar, you can also create a sitemap html page, squeeze page, or with 2011 theme, you can create a showcase page.

To do all of these, you will need to know some programming language. Fortunately, in Twenty Eleven theme’s feature you can find a built-in template where you can have a sliding posts which I personally think really cool.

Screenshot of the result:

(1) Featured post (2) showcase sidebar (3) Recent posts

Twenty Eleven Showcase Template Video Tutorial

So let’s start to check this Twenty Eleven showcase template. Even though before we begin, I would like to mention, in this tutorial, I am using Twenty Eleven child theme.

Also, if you are currently using this theme in your online blog, I also recommend that you install wordpress offline, or even copy the blog in your computer to play around with this.

3. Next is we are going to create a new page, which will displayed in the front or home page. (related: wordpress change home page).

You can name it anything you want, but in this demo, I call it “welcome”.

This is the most important, before publishing this page, look at the right sidebar, on “Page Attributes” → “Template” drop down menu → select “Showcase Template” then you can click “Publish” button.

4. Next, we go to “Settings” → “Reading” in left sidebar of your admin page.

5. Choose “Static Page”. In the “Front Page” select “Welcome” page we created on step (3) above. For the blog page, you can either created a new page called “Blog” or whatever, but in this demo, I just use “Sample Page” which is obviously you will need to change rather than just a “Sample Page”.

Don’t forget to save changes.

6. Refresh your blog, and you should see your “featured posts” which are all of your sticky posts with slider effect.

7. If you want to use the sidebar next to the recent post, you can use standard widgets, like calendar, etc.

Additionally, you can then now finally use showcase sidebar that I have discussed in my previous post this week.

Also, you can now add “Twenty Eleven Ephemera” widget to “showcase sidebar” and as long as you have any posts which have non-standard format, it will be displayed.

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